Ricerc@Sapienza

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently proposing rulemaking to revise the Loss Of Coolant Accident (LOCA) and therefore the Emergency Core Cooling System (ECCS) acceptance criteria, to include the effects of higher burnup on cladding performance as well as to address other technical issues. As motivated by the new rule, the need to use advanced cladding designs may be a result. A loss of operational margin may result due to the more restrictive cladding embrittlement criteria.

There is growing empirical evidence that many river basins across the U.S. Midwest have been experiencing an increase in the frequency of flood events over the most recent decades. Albeit these detected changes are important to understand what happened in our recent past, they cannot be directly extrapolated to obtain information about possible future changes in the frequency of flood events. Building on recent statistically-based attribution studies, we project seasonal changes in the frequency of flood events at 286 U.S. Geological Survey gauging stations across the U.S.